Thanks for this interesting article. Regarding malevolence among business leaders: my impression is that corporations have rewarded malevolence less over time.
E.g. in the early 1900s you had Frederick Taylor (arguably the most influential manager of the 20th century) describing his employees like:
one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.
Modern executives would never say this about their staff, and no doubt this is partly because whatâs said in the boardroom is different from whatâs said in public, but there is a serious sense in which credibly signaling prosocial behaviors towards your employees is useful. E.g. 80 years later you have Paul OâNeill, in almost exactly the same industry as Taylor, putting worker safety as his key metric, because he felt that people would work harder if they felt taken care of by the company.
My guess is that corporations which rely on highly skilled workers benefit more from prosocial executives, and that itâs hard to pretend to be prosocial over a decades-long career, though certainly not impossible. So possibly one hard-to-fake measure of malevolence is whether you repeatedly succeed in a corporation where success requires prosociality.
my impression is that corporations have rewarded malevolence less over time.
Yeah, I think thatâs probably true.
Just to push back a little bit, the pessimistic take would be that corporate executives simply have become better at signalling and public relations. Maybe also partly because the downsides of having bad PR are worse today compared to, say, the 1920sâback then, people were poorer and consumers didnât have the luxury to boycott companies whose bosses said something egregious; workers often didnât have the option to look for another job if they hated their boss, et cetera. Generally, it seems plausible to me that âhumans seem to have evolved to emphasize signaling more in good times than in bad.â (Hanson, 2009).
I wonder if one could find more credible signals of things like âcaring for your employersâ, ideally in statistical form. Money invested in worker safety might be one such metric. Salary discrepancies between employees and corporate executives might be another one (which seems to have gotten way worse since at least the 1970s) though there are obviously many confounders here.
The decline in child labor might be another example of how corporations have rewarded malevolence less over time. In the 19th century, when child labor was common, some amount of malevolence (or at least indifference) was arguably beneficial if you wanted to run a profitable company. Companies run by people who refused to employ children for ethical reasons presumably went bankrupt more often given that they could not compete with companies that used such cheap labor. (On the other hand, itâs not super clear what an altruistic company owner should have done. Many children also needed jobs in order to be able to buy various necessitiesâI donât know.)
Maybe this is simply an example of a more general pattern: Periods of history marked by poverty, scarcity, instability, conflict, and inadequate norms & laws will tend to reward or even require more malicious behavior, and the least ruthless will tend to be outcompeted (compare again Hansonâs âThis is the Dream Timeâ, especially point 4).
I wonder if one could find more credible signals of things like âcaring for your employersâ, ideally in statistical form. Money invested in worker safety might be one such metric.
That seems reasonable. Another possibility is looking at benefits, which have grown rapidly (though there are also many confounders here).
Something which I canât easily measure but seems more robust is the fraction of âiterated gamesâ. E.g. I would expect enterprise salespeople to be less malevolent than B2C ones (at least towards their customers), because successful enterprise sales relies on building relationships over years or decades. Similarly managers are often recruited and paid well because they have a loyal team who will go with them, and so screwing over that team is not in their self-interest.
Thanks for this interesting article. Regarding malevolence among business leaders: my impression is that corporations have rewarded malevolence less over time.
E.g. in the early 1900s you had Frederick Taylor (arguably the most influential manager of the 20th century) describing his employees like:
Modern executives would never say this about their staff, and no doubt this is partly because whatâs said in the boardroom is different from whatâs said in public, but there is a serious sense in which credibly signaling prosocial behaviors towards your employees is useful. E.g. 80 years later you have Paul OâNeill, in almost exactly the same industry as Taylor, putting worker safety as his key metric, because he felt that people would work harder if they felt taken care of by the company.
My guess is that corporations which rely on highly skilled workers benefit more from prosocial executives, and that itâs hard to pretend to be prosocial over a decades-long career, though certainly not impossible. So possibly one hard-to-fake measure of malevolence is whether you repeatedly succeed in a corporation where success requires prosociality.
Thanks, thatâs a good example.
Yeah, I think thatâs probably true.
Just to push back a little bit, the pessimistic take would be that corporate executives simply have become better at signalling and public relations. Maybe also partly because the downsides of having bad PR are worse today compared to, say, the 1920sâback then, people were poorer and consumers didnât have the luxury to boycott companies whose bosses said something egregious; workers often didnât have the option to look for another job if they hated their boss, et cetera. Generally, it seems plausible to me that âhumans seem to have evolved to emphasize signaling more in good times than in bad.â (Hanson, 2009).
I wonder if one could find more credible signals of things like âcaring for your employersâ, ideally in statistical form. Money invested in worker safety might be one such metric. Salary discrepancies between employees and corporate executives might be another one (which seems to have gotten way worse since at least the 1970s) though there are obviously many confounders here.
The decline in child labor might be another example of how corporations have rewarded malevolence less over time. In the 19th century, when child labor was common, some amount of malevolence (or at least indifference) was arguably beneficial if you wanted to run a profitable company. Companies run by people who refused to employ children for ethical reasons presumably went bankrupt more often given that they could not compete with companies that used such cheap labor. (On the other hand, itâs not super clear what an altruistic company owner should have done. Many children also needed jobs in order to be able to buy various necessitiesâI donât know.)
Maybe this is simply an example of a more general pattern: Periods of history marked by poverty, scarcity, instability, conflict, and inadequate norms & laws will tend to reward or even require more malicious behavior, and the least ruthless will tend to be outcompeted (compare again Hansonâs âThis is the Dream Timeâ, especially point 4).
That seems reasonable. Another possibility is looking at benefits, which have grown rapidly (though there are also many confounders here).
Something which I canât easily measure but seems more robust is the fraction of âiterated gamesâ. E.g. I would expect enterprise salespeople to be less malevolent than B2C ones (at least towards their customers), because successful enterprise sales relies on building relationships over years or decades. Similarly managers are often recruited and paid well because they have a loyal team who will go with them, and so screwing over that team is not in their self-interest.